Share the same /home with another distro

[shaakunthala]

Hello,
I'm using Jaunty and I want to install Fedora Leonidas aside as well (dual boot). I use a separate partition for /home and plan to share this same /home among the two distros.

Will this be possible?
Any Ideas?
Any possible problems that I may encounter?

Thank you in advance.

[Dngrsone]

It's possible, but I'm not really sure it's advisable.

I know people have shared /home between *buntu installations, but sharing between two different distributions may have some unintended side effects-- dependancies may be at odds or something.

[agathian]

IMHO, sharing the same /home partition/directory shouldnt be an issue per se.

If any, I would watch out for potential quirks emanating from sharing the dot/config files in your home directories driving the config for things like - shell, windowmanager, X, etc.

[Locutus_of_Borg]

Sharing the same /home is fine
sharing the same /home/<user> is not

[shaakunthala]

Thank you for your replies.

Meanwhile I found another hard disk and I could try it out. Sharing the same /home within Fedora and Ubuntu with the same username causes problems.

[agathian]

Thank you for your replies.

Meanwhile I found another hard disk and I could try it out. Sharing the same /home within Fedora and Ubuntu with the same username causes problems.

Yeah- i totally forgot about that.
it is critical that userid is same - since that is what determines ownership of files.

[orange-wedge]

in theory in order to use the same user's /home directory across distros, you would definitely need to setup the same user ids. this might be your initial problem. then the next issue becomes how each distro/application inside the distro use all those hidden configuration files in your /home directory.

you could possibly write a custom boot script to move the hidden config files to your home directory between distros...

for example make the directories:

/home/username/.ubuntu-confs
/home/username/.other-distro-confs
/home/username/.active-$distroname.lck

where .ubuntu-confs holds all the hidden config files for your user and at boot copies them over to your home directory.

and .active-$distroname.lck is a directory flag to tell you which was the previous active distro used so that you could copy all the current contents to the correct "backup" directory at boot.